Nathaniel Peters

Here’s a nice article by John Allen of the National Catholic Reporter on how Benedict XVI spends his time not by simply denouncing the evils of the world, but by offering Christianity as a positive alternative, what Allen calls “affirmative orthodoxy”: By “affirmative . . . . Continue Reading »

Rusty, that was a great piece on Harvard’s new curriculum. You did a fine job of identifying the ills afflicting modern collegiate pedagogy. To your analysis I would add a brief comment. The modern university can teach students to be critics, and indeed modern college students are very good . . . . Continue Reading »

I finally got around to reading an excellent article that appeared some time ago in the New York Times Magazine . In “Death in the Family,” Daniel Berger writes of the former governor of Washington State, Booth Gardner, who now has Parkinson’s and wants the right to end his life. . . . . Continue Reading »

Imagine this one for a second. The government sends inspectors to abortion clinics to crack down on illegal abortions and the pro-life movement steps up its protests and activism. In response, the abortion clinics do the unforeseen: they go on strike. This may sound like a pipe dream, but the New . . . . Continue Reading »

Since the February 2008 issue went online today, the December 2007 issue is now available for free to all who visit the website. Looking back, my favorite article from that issue was Fr. Neuhaus’s ” True Devotion to Mary ,” in which he identified excesses of Marian devotion and . . . . Continue Reading »

This blurb appears in the New York Times today: Plans to exhume the body of Padre Pio, left, Italy’s favorite saint, to commemorate the 40th anniversary of his death have been met with fierce opposition from followers . . . . Over the weekend, Archbishop Domenico Umberto D’Ambrosio . . . . Continue Reading »

After the Pope’s now-famous Regensburg Address, a group of scholars wrote a response whose signatories came to number 138 scholars and leaders in the Muslim world. This spring three of those scholars will travel to the Vatican to discuss “respect for the dignity of each person, . . . . Continue Reading »

True devotion to Mary, as Fr. Neuhaus recently reminded us , always points us to Christ. Like most converts to Catholicism or Orthodoxy, Marian devotion has taken some getting used to for me. I therefore found Frederica Mathewes-Green’s The Lost Gospel of Mary: The Mother of Jesus in Three . . . . Continue Reading »

Our beloved editor here at First Things has written on many topics, yet on no two has he expounded in greater depth and at greater length than Christmas and death . Apparently many residents of the Great State of California have decided to combine the two. Scholars who study this sort of thing . . . . Continue Reading »

The cover story of this week’s New York Times science section asks the question of the nature of the laws of nature. It’s a fascinating article. First we see Paul Davies, a cosmologist at Arizona State University who, on the Times’ editorial page asserted that all of science . . . . Continue Reading »